Claire Watkins - Battleborn - Stories

On the first day of class, Jules called to me from the aisle of the auditorium like she knew me. I remember her ugly brown boots unlaced and splattered with paint, her short, bleached-out hair. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know her; I didn’t know anyone like her. She made her way over and sat beside me and gave me a flyer for a show downtown where her friend was deejaying.

“I thought you might be into this,” she said. “Last time he was in town he absolutely killed.” I didn’t know it then, but I’d been sitting in lecture halls for three years, staring straight ahead, rounding out the bell curve, waiting for someone like her.

She sat beside me whenever she came to class. I missed her when she didn’t, and she often didn’t. She invited me to more shows and gallery openings, showed me the flyers she’d redesigned herself because the bourgies at the gallery had used some bullshit motel art on theirs. I always went. One day she came into class and convinced me to leave with her before our professor arrived. We took the Spirit bus downtown to the Eldorado and spent the afternoon drinking gimlets and playing the penny slots. She taught me how to smoke. It was the best day I’d ever had.

Jules liked that I was a local. I made her feel authentic, which is especially important to Californians. Soon she was taking me along with her to after-parties and all-night diners with whichever guy had orbited into her life. Nick who worked at Sundance Books, Brady from the co-op, her Life Drawing TA, Corbett, a visiting “electronic installation artist” from Ireland, with his insufferable chronic irony. They asked me stupid questions, like did I come here when I was a kid, and did I know the Heimlich, and what would I do if they started choking. One time I said, “Nothing,” and Jules laughed like a dream I had of her once where she laughed so long and hard that her laugh lifted us both above the city and over the mountains, hand in hand, flying.

That was three years ago. Later, Jules got drunk and told me that she’d only called out to me that first day because she’d thought I was some girl from her sculpture class.

• • •

In the car we pass billboards advertising casinos and tourist attractions. One says The World-Famous Suicide Table and another says Virginia City: A Town of Relics and Memories and Ghosts of the Past and another says Bonanza or Bust . Danny says, “That’s it. The Bonanza.” He looks so pleased with himself that I wonder if he’s making this whole thing up.

We crest the hill and see Virginia City below us, the little strip of Main Street restored to look like the Old West boomtown this once was, the sharp white spire of Saint Mary’s of the Mountains on one edge of town, the iron-gated cemetery creeping up the bald man-made hills of rock on the other. We’ve been here before, the three of us. But every time I see this view I’m struck by how the buildings huddle together on the hillside, how a small town’s like a big family.

We park on the street and stand around the back of the car with the trunk open while we each down a beer. Jules finishes hers first and belches. We toss the empties into the trunk. Jules takes three unopened silver cans from the twelve-pack and puts them in her purse. She puts the last three in mine. “I’m hungry,” she says.

We cross the street and walk for a while. Danny says he likes the hollow sound of our steps on the wood-plank walkway. He’s said this before.

Jules squeals and points and takes pictures of everything like a tourist: a man leading a fat brown horse down a gravel side street, two local women dressed as Old West whores in dyed ostrich-feather hats and corsets, the rotating stainless-steel arms of a machine pulling purple taffy in the window of a candy store. She stands for an absurd amount of time at the plaque about Mark Twain, running her fingers over his little bronze mustache. She pretends not to notice when Danny takes a picture of her there. It’s exhausting.

Danny points to the old-looking hanging sign for the Bucket of Blood Saloon, a sign we’ve seen half a dozen times though we’ve never gone inside. “How about that?” he says.

“That’s fucking awesome,” says Jules. Everything is fucking awesome. Inside, the place is painted all red and has red velvet drapes too big for their windows. Chandeliers dangle from the ceiling, and large oil paintings with ornate gold frames hang on the walls. As far as I can tell, we’re the only patrons not wearing cowboy hats. Jules nods to some old men at a nearby table. “Howdy,” she says. Fucking howdy.

Jules flirts with the bartender, an old guy with the silly striped apron of a nineteenth-century barkeep hanging from his neck. His name tag is handwritten and says Bernie. Jules asks him to fix her his favorite drink and he brings over a Bloody Mary, pungent with extra horseradish. He shrugs shyly and says, “That’s how I like ’em.”

“That’s how I like ’em, too,” she says.

Danny and I taste her Bloody Mary and order two for ourselves. We all order bacon cheeseburgers, which Jules says is lame of us but Danny says is actually super interesting because by having the same meal in the same place we’ll be closing the gaps between us and come closer to fully understanding each other’s experience. These bacon cheeseburgers, he says, have the opportunity to be transcendent.

Jules rocks forward on her stool. “It’s hard to picture your parents eloping.” It is. Danny’s mom, Lucy, is the head pediatric nurse at Saint Mary’s, and his dad, Dick, is a high school principal. They play Boggle and tennis together. Every Saturday morning Lucy organizes the recycling while Dick washes the car.

Our food comes, the meat slippery in the buns. “Tell us what happened,” I say.

“Yeah,” says Jules, her mouth full of burger.

“What do you want to know?” says Danny, chewing on the celery stalk from his drink, loving the attention. “When my mom was eighteen she was engaged to this guy Wally, who worked in a tire factory off Wells. He was a Jehovah’s Witness, like my mom’s whole family. Wally’s dad was an elder in their church and everyone wanted them to get married. And they were going to, too, but my mom met my dad at school and called it off.”

Jules says, “Fucking awesome,” and Danny’s happy to make her happy. I’ve seen her with so many men but none of them have ever looked at her the way Danny does.

He goes on. “But this guy Wally took it pretty bad. They found him butt naked in the Truckee. In March. And I guess he was saying some crazy shit. I don’t know. They should have checked him into a mental institution. I mean, he was eighteen . But his dad, the elder, decided that Wally’s breakdown was actually God talking through his son. At one point the whole congregation was at Wally’s bed, praying, talking about ‘the one hundred and forty-four thousand’ and ‘the Lord’s Evening Meal.’ All that shit.”

The bartender comes over and Danny orders another round of Bloody Marys and two fingers of bourbon for himself. Jules says, “Thanks a million, Bernie. You’re a doll.”

“Anyway, the elder went and talked to my grandma and grandpa about how God had revealed His Great Will and how my mom marrying my dad — a Catholic, of all things — was not, you know, in the divine plan. And the fucked-up part is that they believed him. They told my mom she couldn’t see my dad anymore. Then the three of them — my mom’s parents and Wally’s dad — sat my dad down and said he’d better stay away from my mom, or else. Fucking or else . They thought this kid Wally was some kind of prophet.”

“Which makes your dad what?” says Jules. “The Antichrist?” This is funny, Dick the Antichrist, soaping down the minivan in his too-tight running shorts and tennis shoes from Kmart.